There's a wild and weird side to America's past, filled with strange creatures, bizarre happenings, and sinister figures. Robert Damon Schneck has spent more than a decade devoted to sleuthing out these forgotten accounts of mysterious events. With dry wit he presents such oddities as the West Virginia poltergeist obsessed with cutting everything into crescent shapes, the man who preached better health through drinking blood, and the California family driven insane by Ouija board sessions. Whether true or imagined, here too are compulsively readable accounts of homemade guillotines; Sasquatch sightings on Mt. St. Helens; the psychic who smuggled a crystal ball into the White House; schoolgirls with stigmata; and those baffling modern bogeys, evil clowns driving vans.